Ahhhhhhhh I’ve emerged from hibernation!

And the first thing I did (after showering off the dead skin and brushing my teeth 65 times) was toddle off to the Texas Embassy for the third London Girl Geek Dinner organised by top hot totty Sarah Blow.

As usual, I slurped my supper down in record time and then went round recording people with their mouths full, before the open mic session which worked really well – Thanks to Rachel, Bill, Katy, Jen and Sarah for sharing your various views of geekdom with us. A recording of that session will be up next.

Lovely, as ever, to see Sarah, Adriana, and Rachel C, nice to meet Joy, Juliet, Jamie, Jen, Miranda, Sofia K and Rachel J, sorry I didn’t get to talk in depth to anyone else – and I’m not going to mention the boys by name as they really shouldn’t have been there – don’t they know there’s only room for one girl-geek-guy?

tags: girlgeekdinner & girlgeek & london

All good things come to an end. And all cheesy grooming product video blogs must wind up too. So here we are with a pot of hair wax. There really isn’t much I could have done with this without getting totally out of hand and applying it to other hairy parts of my body I suppose, but luckily for you, I’ve only just thought of that and it didn’t occur to me at the time. The best I could manage were a couple of little horns.

So now it’s competition time. I’m sure that those of you with hair can do better, so send me your photos or links to photos of yourself under the influence of a hair sculpting product. Doesn’t have to be wax, it could be mousse or gel just as easily. The only entry requirement is that you have more hair to play with than me – Sorry Neal, I don’t think you’re going to make it in unless you have something from the archive 😉 The prize…a barely unopened, hardly used pot of Hair Wax, product number 7 in the G-Room range.

And so farewell G-Room review videoblog, it’s been fun getting to know the products – really should have given me some eye-treatment stuff and a free razor and made your face wash smell less like fairy liquid, but I am still using the shaving cream every day and on the odd occasions that I allow women into my bathroom, they’re very impressed by my array of grooming products.

Your suggestions please dear readers for another product range on which I should be let loose.

technorati tags: g-room, videoblog, moisturizer, my hair, grooming

At last the stubble comes off cleanly when I test the G-Room shaving cream using my cheap disposable razor. Now my face is lovely and soft.

Listen out for the classic catch phrases: “It’s very fresh, that’s nice, I like that” , “Ow, don’t poke you’re eye out on the tap, Lloyd” and “Oooh, my face is lovely and soft” But you’ll have to wait till the very end to hear me slap my belly.

File under “shaving fetishes” or “Ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back”

tags: g-room & shaving cream & videoblog & london & blogvertising

OK, we’ve had “Man empties shopping bag”, “Man washes body”, “Man washes hair” now get ready for “Man washes face” with Fairy Liquid. So now you know why I don’t need to wear rubber gloves on my face….or something.

tags: g-room & face+wash & videoblog & london & blogvertising

OK so since both women I’ve lunched with so far this week have begged me to put up another one – here’s part three – Shampoo!

I thought long and hard while in the Perfect Path Editing Suite about whether to cut or censor the scenes of mild and accidental nudity that occur in this one. On balance I decided that it was funnier to keep them in, particularly in juxtaposition with the coyness of the Shower Gel episode and given the way that I really honestly had no idea what had happened until I watched it back just before uploading.

Eat your heart out Warren Beatty.

tags: g-room & shower gel & videoblog & london & blogvertising & my arse

This is the last of three podcasts I’ve produced associated with The Policy Unplugged event at Channel 4 last week, The E Word. Fifty or so thinkers in education – without many of the usual Whitehall suspects gathered to talk about the state of education policy in the UK, to see where there was common ground and explore their differences. I was there as a host with special responsibility to help record the day and capture the essence of the conversations.

With a hard afternoon’s talking behind them, the guests repaired to the bar for….more talking (and some drinking) Again, I mingled among them to find out what they had thought of the day. And they told me. This was right at the beginning mind, goodness knows what they were saying when they’d had a few more sugar-free Red Bulls.

After The E Word (25:30 mins – 11.6MB)

Photos for the event are in this photoset

tags: education & education policy & Policy Unplugged & Channel 4

This is the first of three podcasts I’ve produced associated with The Policy Unplugged event at Channel 4 last week, The E Word. Fifty or so thinkers in education – without many of the usual Whitehall suspects gathered to talk about the state of education policy in the UK, to see where there was common ground and explore their differences. I was there as a host with special responsibility to help record the day and capture the essence of the conversations.

First off, I spent some time mingling with the guests, finding out what they were expecting from the event.

Before The E Word (11:49 mins – 5.4MB)

Photos for the event are in this photoset

tags: education & education policy & Policy Unplugged & Channel 4

[UPDATE: after all the audio problems earlier it should be fine now]

Librivox is an experiment initiated by Hugh McGuire from Montreal to see whether a bunch of interested volunteers can create collaboratively some totally free audiobooks in the public domain. We are taking texts from Project Gutenberg (one of the first resources I ever fell in love with on the internet in about 1992), reading them in chunks and distributing the files as podcasts.

The first project has been The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad and this is my contribution Chapter 7 (10.9MB, 30:52 mins) in which the Assistant Commissioner visits Sir Ethelred (a great personage of Parliament) to discuss progress on the investigation into a recent bombing in London, after which he takes a cab to Soho, planning to confront Verloc whom he strongly (and correctly) suspects of involvement in the anarchist outrage.

Plus ça change…

Note: unlike other material on this blog, which is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, I am releasing this file into the public domain – you may do with it entirely as you wish.

tags: Joseph Conrad & The Secret Agent & London & audio book & librivox

OK, so those of you who’ve been waiting for more video can be temporarily sated with this 1 minute (9.5MB) clip which I shot while walking down the Kings Road yesterday afternoon.

What is bizarre is the angle at which the car had gone through the window of Cafe Nero. It was difficult to imagine that it had been going so fast up the side street, but that’s the only direction it can have been coming from unless it was spinning out of control in which case you’d expect more collateral damage to other traffic.

My favourite bit is all the mobile-phone wielding bypassers doing their thing for citizen journalism!

Just in case you thought Chelsea was boring these days.

tags: london & videoblog & car crash

So on Friday lunchtime I took a stroll around the room and spoke to various participants about their mid-point views of the day (~35 mins, 16MB). I tarried rather too long around the reality-distortion field that is Ben Hammersley’s aura (not sure whether it’s a projection of his personality or one of the utility items on his utili-kilt).

Sadly I missed the opportunity to let Johnnie Moore explain his spider in a jam jar simile or to quiz Geoff on the lack of women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds as these seem to have been the main points of focus in the post-conference blogosphere analysis.

In rough order of appearance you will hear:

Geoff Jones, Suzanne Collins, Marcus ? from the FT, David Morgan, Ash Rattan, Dave Barker, Peter Wainman, Taron Maberry, Paul Goodison, Steve Price, Alistair Shrimpton, Euan Semple, Jem Stone, Ben Hammersley, Suw Charman, Meelis Kuusberg, Simon Phipps, Tony Hammond, Julian Bond, Chris Bose and Andrew Martin
(who didn’t seem to mind at all when I called him Chris at the end!)

Thanks Everyone!

tags: oursocialworld & our social world & blogging & conferences